Archive for the ‘entertainment’ category: Page 18

May 17, 2019

Latvian company Aerones created the machine, which — according to the company — can fly up to 984 feet, compared to 100-foot-height that firefighter ladders can reach. The drone is fitted with a water hose from a fire truck, and is controlled by a pilot on the ground remotely. However, the drone does suffer from low battery life, providing only 30 minutes flight time from a 90-minute charge. It’s still in development, but Aerones hopes to use the machine for real-life operations soon.

May 12, 2019

Scientists want to capture your dreams like a movie — and human trials of the technology will start next year…

Recording and watching people’s dreams has been the subject of mind-bending films like ‘Until the End of the World,’ ‘Total Recall,’ ‘Strange Days’, ‘Minority Report’ and more recent hits like ‘Inception’ and ‘Captain Marvel’.

May 10, 2019

Where did Groot come from? In reality, he came from the imaginations of Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, and Stan Lee. In the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, he came from another planet. In this essay, he came from the stuff in your yard. We’ll see which plants might have evolved, over time, to become the world’s most beloved tree-man. Warning: Major spoilers for the movie after this point!

May 9, 2019

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have succeeded in developing a key constituent of a novel unconventional computing concept. This constituent employs the same magnetic structures that are being researched in connection with storing electronic data on shift registers known as racetracks. In this, researchers investigate so-called skyrmions, which are magnetic vortex-like structures, as potential bit units for data storage. However, the recently announced new approach has a particular relevance to probabilistic computing. This is an alternative concept for electronic data processing where information is transferred in the form of probabilities rather than in the conventional binary form of 1 and 0. The number 2/3, for instance, could be expressed as a long sequence of 1 and 0 digits, with 2/3 being ones and 1/3 being zeros. The key element lacking in this approach was a functioning bit reshuffler, i.e., a device that randomly rearranges a sequence of digits without changing the total number of 1s and 0s in the sequence. That is exactly what the skyrmions are intended to achieve. The results of this research have been published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The researchers used thin magnetic metallic films for their investigations. These were examined in Mainz under a special microscope that made the magnetic alignments in the metallic films visible. The films have the special characteristic of being magnetized in vertical alignment to the film plane, which makes stabilization of the magnetic skyrmions possible in the first place. Skyrmions can basically be imagined as small magnetic vortices, similar to hair whorls. These structures exhibit a so-called topological stabilization that protects them from collapsing too easily – as a hair whorl resists being easily straightened. It is precisely this characteristic that makes skyrmions very promising when it comes to use in technical applications such as, in this particular case, information storage. The advantage is that the increased stability reduces the probability of unintentional data loss and ensures the overall quantity of bits is maintained.